On the bond distance in methane

The equilibrium bond distance in methane was optimized using coupled-pair functional and contracted CI wave functions, and a Gaussian basis that includes g-type functions on carbon and d-type functions on hydrogen. The resulting bond distance, when corrected for core-valence correlation effects, agrees with the experimental value of 2.052 a(0) to within the experimental uncertainty of 0.002 a(0). The main source of error in the best previous studies, which showed discrepancies with experiment of 0.007 a(0) is shown to be basis set incompleteness. In particular, it is important that the basis set be close to saturation, at least for the lower angular quantum numbers.